Hamishsphere

Valentino Garavani’s 45th-anniversary retrospective exhibition, held in 2007 on what would prove to be the eve of his retirement, was brilliantly staged at the Richard Meier–designed Ara Pacis Museum in Rome by Patrick Kinmonth and Antonio Monfreda.

I advised on the curatorial choices, selecting from a trove of treasures in the designer’s extensive archives, and now, almost five years later, those extraordinary clothes can be seen on Valentino’s forthcoming virtual museum (www.valentino-garavani-archives.org), an online archive of all of the designer’s work.

With the museum’s official opening party this week, I was asked to select ten defining moments from his career—an excruciating task, but here goes.